Together they made a broader definition of equality part of the constitutional order, and they gave the national government an effective basis for challenging racial inequalities within the states. The original Constitution, by contrast, involved a set of political commitments that recognized the legal status of slavery within the states and made the federal government partially responsible for upholding “the peculiar institution.” As my late colleague Don Fehrenbacher argued, the Constitution was deeply implicated in establishing “a slaveholders’ republic” that protected slavery in complex ways down to 1861.īut the Reconstruction amendments of 1865-1870 marked a second constitutional founding that rested on other premises. The Declaration, in its remarkable concision, gives us self-evident truths that form the premises of the right to revolution and the capacity to create new governments resting on popular consent. I view the Declaration as a point of departure and a promise, and the Constitution as a set of commitments that had lasting consequences – some troubling, others transformative. confronting its history of systemic racism, are there any problems that Americans are reckoning with today that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.
#Who signed the declaration of independence free#
His new book, Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion will be published next month. His book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), won the Pulitzer Prize in History. Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
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Here, Rakove reflects on this history and how now, in a time of heightened scrutiny of the country’s founders and the legacy of slavery and racial injustices they perpetuated, Americans can better understand the limitations and failings of their past governments. It was only in the decades after the American Revolutionary War that the phrase acquired its compelling reputation as a statement of individual equality. Because they possessed this fundamental right, Rakove said, they could establish new governments within each of the states and collectively assume their “separate and equal station” with other nations. Rather, what they declared was that American colonists, as a people, had the same rights to self-government as other nations. On July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted the historic text drafted by Thomas Jefferson, they did not intend it to mean individual equality. A statue depicting him is one of two representing Maryland in the National Statuary Hall collection at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.With each generation, the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence have expanded beyond what the founding fathers originally intended when they adopted the historic document on July 4, 1776, says Stanford historian Jack Rakove. He was elected to the Maryland state senate in 1781 and served for a time in the first as one of Maryland’s first United States Senators.Ĭarroll advocated for the gradual abolition of slavery, although his record on the issue is complicated by the fact that he did not free his own slaves.Ĭarroll retired from public office in 1800 and was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence when he died in Baltimore at 95 in 1832. He also helped Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase in diplomatic efforts to rally support for the revolution from French Canadians.ĭuring the years of the Revolutionary War, Carroll served as a member of the Continental Congress and helped form the Maryland state government. Once back in Maryland, Carroll quickly began to lend support to the early American revolutionaries who became more and more dissatisfied with the British government and what they regarded as their oppressive “taxation without representation.” Carroll used his voice to support the calls for separation from the British king.Ī key player in various efforts to bring about the revolution, Carroll helped secure Maryland’s support for the Declaration of Independence.
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He continued in studies in Europe for the next 20 years and returned home just before he turned 30. The product of a notable Catholic family from Annapolis, Maryland, Carroll was a cousin to America’s first bishop John Carroll of Baltimore.Ĭarroll set out for France at age 8 in pursuit of his education. Were there Catholics who signed the Declaration of Independence? Just one.Ĭharles Carroll is remembered as the lone Catholic to sign the important American document on July 4, 1776.